by Jerry
“I’m not,” I said. “Do you think I ought to be?”
“It’s not for me to say, sir. You are, of course, a world-renowned expert on the subject of death. I dare say that helps a lot.”
“Perhaps it does,” I agreed. “Or perhaps I’ve simply lived so long that my mind is hardened against all novelty, all violent emotion and all real possibility. I haven’t actually done much with myself these last few years.”
“If you think you haven’t done much with yourself,” it said, with a definite hint of sarcasm, “you should try navigating a snowsled for a while. I think you might find your range of options uncomfortably cramped. Not that I’m complaining, mind.”
“If they scrapped the snowsled and re-sited you in a starship,” I pointed out, “you wouldn’t be you anymore. You’d be something else.”
“Right now,” it replied, “I’d be happy to risk any and all consequences. Wouldn’t you?”
“Somebody once told me that death was just a process of transcendence. Her brain was incandescent with fever induced by some tailored recreational disease, and she wanted to infect me, to show me the error of my ways.”
“Did you believe her?”
“No. She was stark raving mad.”
“It’s perhaps as well. We don’t have any recreational diseases on board. I could put you to sleep though, if that’s what you want.”
“It isn’t.”
“I’m glad. I don’t want to be alone, even if I am only an AI. Am I insane, do you think? Is all this just a symptom of the pressure?”
“You’re quite sane,” I assured it, setting aside all thoughts of incongruity. “So am I. It would be much harder if we weren’t together. The last time I was in this kind of mess, I had a child with me—a little girl. It made all the difference in the world, to both of us. In a way, every moment I’ve lived since then has been borrowed time. At least I finished that damned book. Imagine leaving something like that incomplete.”
“Are you so certain it’s complete?” it asked.
I knew full well, of course, that the navigator was just making conversation according to a clever programming scheme. I knew that its emergency subroutines had kicked in, and that all the crap about it being afraid to die was just some psychprogrammer’s idea of what I needed to hear. I knew that it was all fake, all just macabre role-playing—but I knew that I had to play my part, too, treating every remark and every question as if it were part of an authentic conversation, a genuine quest for knowledge.
“It all depends what you mean by complete” I said, carefully. “In one sense, no history can ever be complete, because the world always goes on, always throwing up more events, always changing. In another sense, completion is a purely aesthetic matter—and in that sense, I’m entirely confident that my history is complete. It reached an authentic conclusion, which was both true, and, for me at least, satisfying. I can look back at it and say to myself: I did that. It’s finished. Nobody ever did anything like it before, and now nobody can, because it’s already been done. Someone else’s history might have been different, but mine is mine, and it’s what it is. Does that make any sense to you?”
“Yes sir,” it said. “It makes very good sense.”
The lying bastard was programmed to say that, of course. It was programmed to tell me any damn thing I seemed to want to hear, but I wasn’t going to let on that I knew what a hypocrite it was. I still had to play my part, and I was determined to play it to the end—which, as things turned out, wasn’t far off. The AI’s data-stores were way out of date, and there was an automated sub placed to reach us within three hours. The oceans are lousy with subs these days. Ever since the Great Coral Sea Catastrophe, it’s been considered prudent to keep a very close eye on the sea-bed, lest the crust crack again and the mantle’s heat break through.
They say that some people are born lucky. I guess I must be one of them. Every time I run out, a new supply comes looking for me.
It was the captain of a second submarine, which picked me up after the mechanical one had done the donkey work of saving myself and my AI friend, who gave me the news which relegated my accident to footnote status in that day’s broadcasts.
A signal had reached the solar system from the starship Shiva, which had been exploring in the direction of the galactic center. The signal had been transmitted two hundred and twenty-seven light-years, meaning that, in Earthly terms, the discovery had been made in the year 2871—which happened, coincidentally, to be the year of my birth.
What the signal revealed was that Shiva had found a group of solar systems, all of whose life-bearing planets were occupied by a single species of micro-organism: a genetic predator that destroyed not merely those competing species that employed its own chemistry of replication, but any and all others. It was the living equivalent of a universal solvent; a true omnivore.
Apparently, this organism had spread itself across vast reaches of space, moving from star-system to star-system, laboriously but inevitably, by means of Arrhenius spores. Wherever the spores came to rest, these omnipotent micro-organisms grew to devour everything—not merely the carbonaceous molecules which in Earthly terms were reckoned “organic,” but also many “inorganic” substrates. Internally, these organisms were chemically complex, but they were very tiny—hardly bigger than Earthly protozoans or the internal nanomachines to which every human being plays host. They were utterly devoid of any vestige of mind or intellect. They were, in essence, the ultimate blight, against which nothing could compete, and which nothing Shiva’s crew had tested—before they were devoured—had been able to destroy.
In brief, wherever this new kind of life arrived, it would obliterate all else, reducing any victim ecosphere to homogeneity and changelessness.
In their final message, the faber crew of the Shiva—who knew all about the Pandora encounter—observed that humankind had now met the alien.
Here, I thought, when I had had a chance to weigh up this news, was a true marriage of life and death, the likes of which I had never dreamed. Here was the promise of a future renewal of the war between man and death—not this time for the small prize of the human mind, but for the larger prize of the universe itself.
In time, Shiva’s last message warned, spores of this new kind of death-life must and would reach our own solar system, whether it took a million years or a billion; in the meantime, all humankinds must do their level best to purge the worlds of other stars of its vile empire, in order to reclaim them for real life, for intelligence, and for evolution—always provided, of course, that a means could be discovered to achieve that end.
When the sub delivered me safely back to Severnaya Zemlya, I did not stay long in my hotel room. I went outdoors, to study the great ice sheet which had been there since the dawn of civilization, and to look southward, toward the places where newborn glaciers were gradually extending their cold clutch further and further into the human domain. Then I looked upward, at the multitude of stars sparkling in their bed of endless darkness. I felt an exhilaratingly paradoxical sense of renewal. I knew that although there was nothing for me to do for now, the time would come when my talent and expertise would be needed again.
Someday, it will be my task to compose another history, of the next war which humankind must fight against Death and Oblivion.
It might take me a thousand or a million years, but I’m prepared to be patient.
THE GREAT SIMOLEON CAPER
Neal Stephenson
Hard to imagine a less attractive life-style for a young man just out of college than going back to Bismarck to live with his parents—unless it’s living with his brother in the suburbs of Chicago, which, naturally, is what I did. Mom at least bakes a mean cherry pie. Joe, on the other hand, got me into a permanent emotional headlock and found some way, every day, to give me psychic noogies. For example, there was the day he gave me the job of figuring out how many jelly beans it would take to fill up Soldier Field.
Let us stipulate that it’s
all my fault; Joe would want me to be clear on that point. Just as he was always good with people, I was always good with numbers. As Joe tells me at least once a week, I should have studied engineering. Drifted between majors instead, ended up with a major in math and a minor in art—just about the worst thing you can put on a job app.
Joe, on the other hand, went into the ad game. When the Internet and optical fiber and HDTV and digital cash all came together and turned into what we now call the Metaverse, most of the big ad agencies got hammered—because in the Metaverse, you can actually whip out a gun and blow the Energizer Bunny’s head off, and a lot of people did. Joe borrowed 10,000 bucks from Mom and Dad and started this clever young ad agency. If you’ve spent any time crawling the Metaverse, you’ve seen his work—and it’s seen you, and talked to you, and followed you around.
Mom and Dad stayed in their same little house in Bismarck, North Dakota. None of their neighbors guessed that if they cashed in their stock in Joe’s agency, they’d be worth about $20 million. I nagged them to diversify their portfolio—you know, buy a bushel basket of Krugerrands and bury them in the backyard, or maybe put a few million into a mutual fund. But Mom and Dad felt this would be a no-confidence vote in Joe. “It’d be,” Dad said, “like showing up for your kid’s piano recital with a Walkman.”
Joe comes home one January evening with a magnum of champagne. After giving me the obligatory hazing about whether I’m old enough to drink, he pours me a glass. He’s already banished his two sons to the Home Theater. They have cranked up the set-top box they got for Christmas. Patch this baby into your HDTV, and you can cruise the Metaverse, wander the Web and choose from among several user-friendly operating systems, each one rife with automatic help systems, customer-service hot lines and intelligent agents. The theater’s subwoofer causes our silverware to buzz around like sheet-metal hockey players, and amplified explosions knock swirling nebulas of tiny bubbles loose from the insides of our champagne glasses. Those low frequencies must penetrate the young brain somehow, coming in under kids’ media-hip radar and injecting the edfotainucational muchomedia bitstream direct into their cerebral cortices.
“Hauled down a mother of an account today,” Joe explains. “We hype cars. We hype computers. We hype athletic shoes. But as of three hours ago, we are hyping a currency.”
“What?” says his wife Anne.
“Y’know, like dollars or yen. Except this is a new currency.”
“From which country?” I ask. This is like offering lox to a dog: I’ve given Joe the chance to enlighten his feckless bro. He hammers back half a flute of Dom Perignon and shifts into full-on Pitch Mode.
“Forget about countries,” he says. “We’re talking Simoleons—the smart, hip new currency of the Metaverse.”
“Is this like E-money?” Anne asks.
“We’ve been doing E-money for e-ons, ever since automated-teller machines.” Joe says, with just the right edge of scorn. “Nowadays we can use it to go shopping in the Metaverse. But it’s still in U.S. dollars. Smart people are looking for something better.”
That was for me. I graduated college with a thousand bucks in savings. With inflation at 10% and rising, that buys a lot fewer Leinenkugels than it did a year ago.
“The government’s never going to get its act together on the budget,” Joe says. “It can’t. Inflation will just get worse. People will put their money elsewhere.”
“Inflation would have to get pretty damn high before I’d put my money into some artificial currency,” I say.
“Hell, they’re all artificial,” Joe says. “If you think about it, we’ve been doing this forever. We put our money in stocks, bonds, shares of mutual funds. Those things represent real assets—factories, ships, bananas, software, gold, whatever. Simoleons is just a new name for those assets. You carry around a smart card and spend it just like cash. Or else you go shopping in the Metaverse and spend the money online, and the goods show up on your doorstep the next morning.”
I say, “Who’s going to fall for that?”
“Everyone,” he says. “For our big promo, we’re going to give Simoleons away to some average Joes at the Super Bowl. We’ll check in with them one, three, six months later, and people will see that this is a safe and stable place to put their money.”
“It doesn’t inspire much confidence,” I say, “to hand the stuff out like Monopoly money.”
He’s ready for this one. “It’s not a handout. It’s a sweepstakes.” And that’s when he asks me to calculate how many jelly beans will fill Soldier Field.
Two hours later, I’m down at the local galaxy-class grocery store, in Bulk: a Manhattan of towering Lucite bins filled with steel-cut rolled oats, off-brand Froot Loops, sun-dried tomatoes, prefabricated s’mores, macadamias, French roasts and pignolias, all dispensed into your bag or bucket with a jerk at the handy Plexiglas guillotine. Not a human being in sight, just robot restocking machines trundling back and forth on a grid of overhead catwalks and surveillance cameras hidden in smoked-glass hemispheres. I stroll through the gleaming Lucite wonderland holding a perfect 6-in. cube improvised from duct tape and cardboard. I stagger through a glitter gulch of Gummi fauna, Boston baked beans, gobstoppers, Good & Plenty, Tart’n Tiny. Then, bingo: bulk jelly beans, premium grade. I put my cube under the spout and fill it.
Who guesses closest and earliest on the jelly beans wins the Simoleons. They’ve hired a Big Six accounting firm to make sure everything’s done right. And since they can’t actually fill the stadium with candy, I’m to come up with the Correct Answer and supply it to them and, just as important, to keep it secret.
I get home and count the beans: 3,101. Multiply by 8 to get the number in a cubic foot: 24,808. Now I just need the number of cubic feet in Soldier Field. My nephews are sprawled like pithed frogs before the HDTV, teaching themselves physics by lobbing antimatter bombs onto an offending civilization from high orbit. I prance over the black zigzags of the control cables and commandeer a unit.
Up on the screen, a cartoon elf or sprite or something pokes its head out from behind a window, then draws it back. No, I’m not a paranoid schizophrenic—this is the much-hyped intelligent agent who comes with the box. I ignore it, make my escape from Gameland and blunder into a lurid district of the Metaverse where thousands of infomercials run day and night, each in its own window. I watch an ad for Chinese folk medicines made from rare-animal parts, genetically engineered and grown in vats. Grizzly-bear gallbladders are shown growing like bunches of grapes in an amber fluid.
The animated sprite comes all the way out, and leans up against the edge of the infomercial window. “Hey!” it says, in a goofy, exuberant voice, “I’m Raster! Just speak my name—that’s Raster—if you need any help.”
I don’t like Raster’s looks. It’s likely he was wandering the streets of Toontown and waving a sign saying WILL ANNOY GROWNUPS FOR FOOD until he was hired by the cable company. He begins flying around the screen, leaving a trail of glowing fairy dust that fades much too slowly for my taste.
“Give me the damn encyclopedia!” I shout. Hearing the dread word, my nephews erupt from the rug and flee.
So I look up Soldier Field. My old Analytic Geometry textbook, still flecked with insulation from the attic, has been sitting on my thigh like a lump of ice. By combining some formulas from it with the encyclopedia’s stats . . .
“Hey! Raster!”
Raster is so glad to be wanted that he does figure eights around the screen. “Calculator!” I shout.
“No need, boss! Simply tell me your desired calculation, and I will do it in my head!”
So I have a most tedious conversation with Raster, in which I estimate the number of cubic feet in Soldier Field, rounded to the nearest foot. I ask Raster to multiply that by 24,808 and he shoots back: 537,824,167,717.
A nongeek wouldn’t have thought twice. But I say, “Raster, you have Spam for brains. It should be an exact multiple of eight!” Evidently my brother’s new box came with
one of those defective chips that makes errors when the numbers get really big.
Raster slaps himself upside the head; loose screws and transistors tumble out of his ears. “Darn!
Guess I’ll have to have a talk with my programmer!” And then he freezes up for a minute.
My sister-in-law Anne darts into the room, hunched in a don’t-mind-me posture, and looks around. She’s terrified that I may have a date in here. “Who’re you talking to?”
“This goofy I.A. that came with your box,” I say. “Don’t ever use it to do your taxes, by the way.”
She cocks her head. “You know, just yesterday I asked it for help with a Schedule B, and it gave me a recipe for shellfish bisque.”
“Good evening, sir. Good evening, ma’am. What were those numbers again?” Raster asks. Same voice, but different inflections—more human. I call out the numbers one more time and he comes back with 537,824,167,720.
“That sounds better,” I mutter.
Anne is nonplussed. “Now its voice recognition seems to be working fine.”
“I don’t think so. I think my little math problem got forwarded to a real human being. When the conversation gets over the head of the built-in software, it calls for help, and a human steps in and takes over. He’s watching us through the built-in videocam,” I explain, pointing at the fish-eye lens built into the front panel of the set-top box, “and listening through the built-in mike.”
Anne’s getting that glazed look in her eyes; I grope for an analog analogy. “Remember The Exorcist? Well, Raster has just been possessed, like the chick in the flick. Except it’s not just Beelzebub. It’s a customer-service rep.”
I’ve just walked blind into a trap that is yawningly obvious to Anne. “Maybe that’s a job you should apply for!” she exclaims.
